Top reasons for network downtime

New research paints a somewhat bleak picture of network performance. Outages are frequent. Hours typically pass before an issue is reported and resolved. Protective measures are manual and error prone.The source of the data is a survey of 315 network pros at midsize and large enterprises. The survey was sponsored by Veriflow, a San Jose, Calif.-based startup that aims to minimize the risk of network vulnerabilities and outages. Veriflow’s software is designed to catch network problems before they happen by predicting possible network-wide behavior and continually verifying that a network model adheres to an enterprise’s security and resilience policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top reasons for network downtime

New research paints a somewhat bleak picture of network performance. Outages are frequent. Hours typically pass before an issue is reported and resolved. Protective measures are manual and error prone.The source of the data is a survey of 315 network pros at midsize and large enterprises. The survey was sponsored by Veriflow, a San Jose, Calif.-based startup that aims to minimize the risk of network vulnerabilities and outages. Veriflow’s software is designed to catch network problems before they happen by predicting possible network-wide behavior and continually verifying that a network model adheres to an enterprise’s security and resilience policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Inspecting SCEP enrollment traffic

SCEP is a protocol which facilitates client enrollment with a Certificate Authorities (CA), delivery and renewal of certificates and delegation of identity verification from a CA to a trusted Registration Authoritie (RA)

A project I'm working on requires me to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on behalf client which doesn't exist yet, and deliver of those requests to the CA via an RA that I'm building. I'll then set aside the certificate and keys for installation onto the client system when it becomes available.

It seemed like ripping apart a request from a real client, as delivered by a real RA would be a good place to start, so that's what I did. I set up a CA (R1), an RA (R2) and a client (R3), performed the enrollment and captured the traffic between the R2 and R1.

There's a nice diagram detailing how a client delivers its  to a CA on this Cisco page, so have a quick peek at the breakdown listed under Client Enrollment there.

A CSR delivered by an RA (rather than the client) is similarly encapsulated, except that both of the PKCS7 functions are performed by the RA (with the RA's private key), Continue reading

US lawmakers introduce bill to delay enhanced government hacking powers

U.S. lawmakers have introduced legislation to delay the coming into force on Dec. 1 of a rule change that aims to expand the government's ability to search computers and other digital devices across many jurisdictions with a single warrant.The new Review the Rule Act aims to delay for discussion proposed amendments to rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure until July 1 next year. The changes to the rule have already been approved by the Supreme Court in April, and if Congress doesn’t act to the contrary, they will go into effect on Dec. 1.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US lawmakers introduce bill to delay enhanced government hacking powers

U.S. lawmakers have introduced legislation to delay the coming into force on Dec. 1 of a rule change that aims to expand the government's ability to search computers and other digital devices across many jurisdictions with a single warrant.The new Review the Rule Act aims to delay for discussion proposed amendments to rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure until July 1 next year. The changes to the rule have already been approved by the Supreme Court in April, and if Congress doesn’t act to the contrary, they will go into effect on Dec. 1.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Monitoring at Terabit speeds

The chart was generated from industry standard sFlow telemetry from the switches and routers comprising The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC16) network. The chart shows a number of conference participants pushing the network to see how much data they can transfer, peaking at a combined bandwidth of 3 Terabits/second over a minute just before noon and sustaining over 2.5 Terabits/second for over an hour. The traffic is broken out by MAC vendors code: routed traffic can be identified by router vendor (Juniper, Brocade, etc.) and layer 2 transfers (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) are identified by host adapter vendor codes (Mellanox, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, etc.).

From the SCinet web page, "The Fastest Network Connecting the Fastest Computers: SC16 will host the most powerful and advanced networks in the world – SCinet. Created each year for the conference, SCinet brings to life a very high-capacity network that supports the revolutionary applications and experiments that are a hallmark of the SC conference."

SC16 live real-time weathermaps provides additional demonstrations of high performance network monitoring.

Without tech industry guidance, U.S. may resort to weakening encryption

Apple may have refused to help the FBI unlock an iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter, but the tech industry is still better off working with the U.S. government on encryption issues than turning away, according to a former official with the Obama administration. “The government can get very creative,” said Daniel Rosenthal, who served as the counterterrorism director in the White House until January this year. He fears that the U.S. government will choose to “go it alone” and take extreme approaches to circumventing encryption, especially if another terrorist attack occurs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Without tech industry guidance, U.S. may resort to weakening encryption

Apple may have refused to help the FBI unlock an iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter, but the tech industry is still better off working with the U.S. government on encryption issues than turning away, according to a former official with the Obama administration. “The government can get very creative,” said Daniel Rosenthal, who served as the counterterrorism director in the White House until January this year. He fears that the U.S. government will choose to “go it alone” and take extreme approaches to circumventing encryption, especially if another terrorist attack occurs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple offers to repair iPhone 6 Plus devices with ‘touch disease’

Apple is offering to repair at a reduced price iPhone 6 Plus smartphones with display flickering or multitouch issues.The problem, described in August as “touch disease” by repair guide website iFixit, is characterized by a gray, flickering bar at the top of the display and an unresponsive touchscreen. The issue affects both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, according to iFixit.Apple appears to consider it a problem with the way users handled the phone rather than a defect. It said Thursday that the company has determined that the smartphones may exhibit display flickering or Multi-Touch issues “after being dropped multiple times on a hard surface and then incurring further stress on the device.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Freshly-funded Message.io buddies up with Microsoft on chatbots

Starting from behind the likes of Slack and HipChat with its new workplace collaboration Teams service, Microsoft can use all the help it can get. Startup Message.io is among those coming to its aid.Message.io, a bot translation tool and syndication service provider founded last year, enables developers to quickly port and scale their bots to work on numerous enterprise messaging platforms without making coding changes. It is partnering with Microsoft so that bots built for other messaging platforms will work on Teams within Office 365 (not to mention on Microsoft's Skype for Business).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Look what GE can do with industrial IoT

Look what GE can do with industrial IoTImage by Stephen LawsonGeneral Electric showcased its industrial internet of things solutions and partnerships this week at its annual Minds + Machines conference in San Francisco this week. The industrial powerhouse is transforming itself into an IoT software and services company focused on improving customers' efficiency, productivity and revenue streams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Technology Short Take #73

Welcome to Technology Short Take #73. Sorry for the long delay since the last Technology Short Take; personal matters have been taking quite the toll (if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know to what personal matters I’m referring). In any case, enough of that—here’s some data center-related content that I hope you find useful!

Networking

  • Ansible has made some good progress in supporting network automation in the latest release (2.2), according to this blog post. This is an area where I hope to spend more time in the coming weeks before years’ end.
  • Tomas Fojta shows how to use a PowerShell script to monitor the health of NSX Edge gateways.
  • Jeremy Stretch mulls over the (perceived) problem of getting traffic into and out of overlay networks. I recommend reading this article, as well as reading the comments. Many commenters suggest just using L3 and having the hosts participate in a routing protocol like BGP, but as Jeremy points out many switches don’t have the capacity to handle that many routes. (Or, if they do, they’re quite expensive.) Seems like there’s this company in Palo Alto making a product that handles this issue pretty decently…(hint).
  • Cumulus Continue reading

AWS October roundup: Hybrid deployments with Amazon’s cloud get a boost

You might think Amazon Web Services would have chilled out in the month before its big Re:Invent conference. After all, that show, which takes place at the end of November, is when the cloud provider typically shows off a bonanza of new products and features.But Christmas has come early in October, at least for people who are looking to run hybrid cloud deployments with AWS. Here's the rundown of important news you may have missed. VMware and Amazon team up The big bombshell for the month was a partnership between AWS and VMware. The latter company is going to launch a managed service that will make it easy for people to migrate workloads from on-premises hardware to the public cloud and back again, using VMware's vSphere management software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

29% off RTIC 30 oz. Tumbler – Deal Alert

This 30oz. RTIC tumbler is made of 18/8 stainless steel, and is double wall vacuum insulated to keep your drinks ice cold for up to 24 hrs, and hot beverages up to 6. It features a shatterproof crystal clear lid so you always know how much you've got left. It's tall & narrow shape makes it suitable for most cup holders. The RTIC tumbler is currently a #1 Amazon best seller with 4.5 out of 5 stars from nearly 8,000 people (80% rate 5 stars: read recent reviews). Its list price is currently discounted 29% to just $11.99. See it on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Azure October Roundup: Price drops, data analysis, and more

Put away the Halloween candy, and dust off your stuffed turkeys, folks. October is long gone, as are a fresh set of announcements from Microsoft about changes to its Azure cloud platform. Here's the important news you might have missed.Price drops for a bunch of Azure compute instances If there's one constant in the public cloud, it's the back-and-forth between competing providers over who gets to claim that they have the cheapest services. Microsoft fired another shot in that war in October, dropping prices for its A1, A2, Dv2 and F series compute instances. Here's how that breaks down, straight from a blog post by Microsoft Corporate Vice President Takeshi Numoto:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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